Does a good social mix create greater security for urban residents?

This episode we're talking mixité or diversity. How does it affect public space socially and politically in the Parisian region.

The title of the project, Here There Be Dragons, comes from a medieval mapping convention, where cartographers would draw sea monsters and demons over unexplored land or dangerous territories accompanied by the phrase hic sunt dracones, here be dragons. It is a method of defining the borders of a world or territory by uncertainty and fear. Through my own experiences with exploring cities, I came to believe that this system of world defining is fairly common. I wanted to investigate the idea that residents of cities negotiate their identities through public space and define the boundaries of their cities by what is feared or uncertain.

For our final episode, we’ll be picking up where the Utopia episode left off. How do residents take ownership of their cities?

A question that I asked each resident was where their personal city center was, where was the heart of the city to them. And how did they come to feel that way? This episode we’re exploring the many different Parises that exist for its residents. Some of them reached to the city’s past for the answers, some reach into their own pasts, while still others saw the city’s heart in Paris’s future.

In this episode I’ll also be responding to some listener questions about themes from past episodes and how we went about certain aspects of the show. Look for that at the end of the episode.

It will come as no surprise to you that Paris, a city that is roughly two thousand years old, has had many plans for urban utopias. Utopias of morality, technology, health, and much more. Plans for the aristocracy, for the poor, for police, for immigrants and on and on. But one person’s utopia can be another person’s nightmare depending on who you talk to.

In this episode we’ll be diving into the utopias scattered throughout Paris in the 20th century. Who were they built for and who were they built to keep out?

This episode will focus not just on the identities of people but of places. We’ll be talking about the way that Paris is divided through years of history, politics and design. Cities have significant physical and psychic borders that create local bias and affinities. Paris is no different.

Last episode we talked about “French hipsters” or bobos and the anxiety about being perceived as one. This episode we’ll be expanding our ideas about how people want to be perceived in public space. The stereotype of Parisians being stylish and glamorous trendsetters is nothing new. But the more you get to know the city the more you see how style can be contentious. It often dances along the fault lines of gender, class, religion, race, and sexuality. How people dress is directly influenced by how they want to be treated in public space.

Bobo means bourgeois-bohème; a left leaning, culture loving elite. Kind of the French version of the hipster. Someone of or joining a more comfortable class who likes to dabble in the cultural spaces of the working class and/or ethnic groups. The bobo like the hipster is the boogieman of gentrification. No one wants to be bobo and yet we see them everywhere. And with their presence goes the neighborhoods we knew. This episode will be dispatches from and on the edge of Boboland.

This episode we’re going to look at the question of communitarianism, residents separating or isolating into communities.

The decision of whether to live in a community that reflects only you or a community that reflects the demographics of the whole nation is about more than just simple comfort. We’re going to talk about many different types of communities in this episode and why residents choose to embrace or reject them.

Does a good social mix create greater security for urban residents?

This episode we're talking mixité or diversity. How does it affect public space socially and politically in the Parisian region.